Borges Marathon, Part 23: Three Versions of Judas

The Artifices collection by Jorge Luis Borges includes an unusual number of pieces that actually qualify as short stories. “Three Versions of Judas”, however, is not a story—it deserves that awkward name of “fiction” that gets applied to Borges’s melding of non-fiction forms with fictional content.

In this case, the form is a scholarly article, similar to ones we’ve looked at previously in this Borges Marathon, such as “A Survey of the Works of Herbert Quain” or “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote“. It concerns an invented Swedish academic called Nils Runeberg who comes up with some creative interpretations of the life of Judas.

What this means really is that Jorge Luis Borges gets to explore his own creative interpretations of the life of Judas using Nils Runeberg as a proxy. The three versions of Judas that he presents to us are:

1. Judas’s betrayal is an act of self-sacrifice to set in motion the sacrifice of Jesus and the redemption of humanity.
2. Judas’s betrayal of Jesus was an act of asceticism, choosing the worst of sins and renouncing honour and admission to heaven.
3. When the Word became Flesh, it did so not in the form of Jesus, but Judas.

Borges/Runeberg weaves convincing arguments around each of these hypotheses. For the first, for example, he shows how superfluous Judas’s sacrifice was:

“In order to identify a teacher who preached every day in the synagogue and worked miracles in the plain sight of thousands of people, there was no need of betrayal by one of the teacher’s own apostles.”

The betrayal must serve some higher purpose, then, and Runeberg argues that a human had to make a sacrifice to mirror the sacrifice of Jesus, and Judas was chosen to perform this role.

For the second version of Judas, Runeberg argues that since Judas was one of the apostles chosen to herald the kingdom of heaven, “the acts of a man thus singled out by the Redeemer merit the most sympathetic interpretation we can give them.” Base greed makes no sense, but asceticism does.

And for the third version of Judas, Runeberg points out that God could not truly have become Man without also being capable of sin. And what more human form to take than Judas himself?

“God was made totally man, but man to the point of iniquity, man to the point of reprobation and the Abyss. In order to save us, He could have chosen any of the lives that weave the confused web of history: He could have been Alexander or Pythagoras or Rurik or Jesus; he chose an abject existence: He was Judas.”

Like his other acts of fictional scholarship, “Three Versions of Judas” allows Borges to indulge in some gentle satire of the academic process. Each of Runeberg’s three versions of Judas gets met with a storm of criticism and attack, forcing him to constantly revise his thesis. Yet these revisions do not bring consensus—instead, with each revision, Runeberg’s position becomes more entrenched, his theory more extreme, and the criticism more vehement.

Even when theologians disdain his final book and readers ignore it, considering it “a vapid and tedious theological game” (a criticism that Borges is clearly aware could be applied to this fiction), Runeberg remains undaunted: he “sensed in that ecumenical indifference an almost miraculous confirmation.” God, he reasons, does not want His secret to be known, so he has ordered that Runeberg’s book be met with indifference.

Now, of course, we are witnessing how both academia and religion respond to criticism and contradiction. From here, Runeberg suffers a swift decline and death, to be remembered only by a few heresiologists for adding to the concept of the Son “the complexities of misery and evil”.

Like Nils Runeberg, “Three Versions of Judas” is not widely remembered or appreciated. As I’m rereading the fictions of Jorge Luis Borges, I usually remember at least some of the piece in question, but this time it was as if I was reading an entirely new work. Even now that I’ve written this post about it, I doubt it will linger long in the memory.

Nevertheless, it’s a clever way of writing a fictional academic treatise, and perhaps it will be more rewarding for people who have more interest in Christian theology than I do. If you’re curious and want to learn more, I’d recommend Ron Roizen’s examination of this fiction in the light of the 2006 English translation of the Gospel of Judas.

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On his blog A Writer’s Life, British novelist Andrew Blackman shares book reviews, insights into the writing process and the latest literary news, as well as listing short story contests with a total of more than $250,000 in prize money.